Transforming a Short Story into a Novel
Transforming a Short Story into a Novel
By Julie Tollefson
When Robin Yocum published his 2020 short story “The Last Hit,” he felt like Angelo Cipriani, his main character, had more to say. Too many questions remained unanswered for the author, so he set out to explore Angelo’s life more fully. The result is his newest novel, The Last Hitman, due out December 2 from Crooked Lane Books. Here, Robin offers five tips for transforming a story of a few thousand words into a book-length manuscript.
1) Listen to your characters — “The Last Hit,” originally published in Strand Magazine and later picked up for The Best American Mystery Stories 2020, features Angelo, a Mob hitman whose skillset doesn’t match the needs of the family’s younger generation. For 6,000 words, Angelo faces threats on multiple fronts — the FBI tries to flip him, and the new head of the Mob wants to take him out. Angelo survives, and that’s where the story ends.
But...
“Angelo was one of those characters that I really liked,” Robin says. “I knew I had to expand that character. I wanted to know where he came from and how he got there. You don’t wake up one morning and suddenly you’re a Mob hitman.”
Angelo had more to say, and Robin wanted to let him say it.
2) Expand, don’t replicate, the world — The Last Hitman is not strictly an extended play version of “The Last Hit,” though the basics of its plot are embedded in the narrative and gave Robin a boost as he explored a fuller picture of Angelo’s life and times.
“It was nice to have a 6,000-word head start, and I did extract some of the dialog,” Robin says. But readers will get to know more about Angelo the person — the choices and circumstances that led to him becoming a hitman for the Mob. And the end of the short story, a twist in which Angelo outsmarts the forces that want him dead, becomes the jumping off point for the last section of the novel.
“I didn’t write the short story intending to make a novel,” Robin says. “Though it was a good way to end the short story, I kind of left him in the lurch. I almost felt I had to help him out a little bit.”
3) The devil’s in the details — Transforming the story to a novel meant filling in the blank spaces and resolving some of the ambiguity and questions left hanging in “The Last Hit.”
“You want him to be a likable guy, so you have to create a character who’s a hitman but has some humanity about him,” Robin says. He met the challenge by giving Angelo a sympathetic past, an opportunity to be a good friend to an old buddy who now resides in a nursing home, a sense of humor, and a love interest.
“At the same time, he’s got this misguided loyalty to the Mob family, even though it’s not a two-way street,” Robin says.
Through the course of the novel, Angelo’s whole backstory emerges, from his younger days as a lackey for the Mob, as he moves up the chain, to his loyalty to the family that saved him from poverty.
To increase authenticity, Robin set the novel in Steubenville, Ohio — near his hometown of Brilliant — where the Mob once had a huge presence.
“Gambling and prostitution were so wide open when I was a kid. It was so commonplace that it wasn’t even unusual to me,” Robin says. “I figured that was a ripe area. I could move the action to Steubenville and then just write about some of my experiences growing up or what I knew to be the reality of my world back there.”
4) Consider your strengths — Though Robin has written and published numerous short stories, he finds it easier to write novels. “Trying to wrap everything up in five or six thousand words? I’m just getting warmed up,” he says. “The best short stories I’ve read almost seem to be like a stream of consciousness, if that makes any sense, and they don’t have to go anywhere. It can be an interesting slice of life.”
Not so for a novel.
Typically, Robin begins with a launch point — “It’s that one little germ of an idea that makes me think I could wrap a book around this” — and then spends weeks or months thinking before he puts words on the page. He doesn’t begin writing until he knows how the story ends.
“I always think I can draw the road map to get there, as long as I know where there is,” he says.
5) Weigh the possibilities — Not all stories are suited to the kind of transformation that turned “The Last Hit” into The Last Hitman.
“I have other short stories that I don’t think would particularly lend themselves to be converted into a book,” Robin says. “I’ve only written two books that have recurring characters. I write in first-person, so usually by the time I get to the end of a short story or a book, I’m tired of listening to them and I’m ready to move on.”
Some stories, though, like Angelo’s, represent possibilities.
“You have to like your protagonist, and you have to believe that they have more to say,” Robin says. Above all, he says, trust your instincts. “I’m really happy with the way this one turned out. In spite of his flaws and the fact that he’s left bodies all over the place, I still hope the reader’s going to pull for Angelo.”